Last year, Ben Cronin wrote about the importance of the first six games of a football league season (link) in the context of positions at the end of the season.
Ben’s analysis of the English Premier League noted:
The winner of Premier League has been outside the top four after six games on only thee occasions since the 38 game season was introduced in 1995/96 – (Manchester United moved from 10th to 1st in 2002/03, Manchester City won the league despite being 7th after six games in 2013/14 and Chelsea moved from 8th to 1st in 2016/17).
I followed up on Ben’s work with a look at six European leagues for the 2018-2019 seasons. Teams’ points per game averages after six games (PPG6) were:
After the latest rounds in all of the leagues, the average points per game (PPGn) are:
I looked at teams’ current performance relative to their week 6 positions (Change6n):
Postscript
In the 2017-2018 seasons in the six European leagues, four were won by the team leading their respective tables at week 6. The two exceptions were: in the Bundesliga, Bayern were third in week 6, the leaders then, Dortmund, finished 4th (29 points behind Bayern); in Serie A, Juventus were second on goal difference to Napoli, by the end of the season Napoli had moved to 2nd and were 4 points adrift of Juventus.
